


waiting to be long and gone

by badskeletonpuns



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Road Trip, Android Hera, Angst, Bittersweet, Command Is A Bad, F/F, F/M, Fluff, Minkowski POV mostly, Mutual Pining, alternate title: doug eiffel's ultimate road trip playlist, eiffera - Freeform, haunted hotels, liminal spaces, minlace, post-hephaestus au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-13 07:53:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11180349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badskeletonpuns/pseuds/badskeletonpuns
Summary: My entry for the Wolf 359 Big Bang! Lovelace, Hera, Eiffel and Minkowski have all made it home to Earth. Unfortunately, Goddard is still alive and well and the four of them have had so much revolution in their lives, they aren't sure if they want to start another one. Still. They have to do something, trapped in a tiny apartment living on Goddard bribes and borrowed time.So they go on a road trip.





	waiting to be long and gone

Life on earth didn’t suit Lovelace. 

It didn’t suit any of them, but if Minkowski pretended it was just Lovelace it meant she didn’t have to deal with the rest of it. 

The lost look in Eiffel’s eyes, the way Hera stumbled and stuttered in the new body that was far too small, how her own hands shook chopping vegetables for dinner. It was easier to focus on Lovelace, sharp edges and caustic words never quite fitting into the spaces that they should have.

Life was supposed to be good.

Goddard had- well, Goddard had gotten away with a lot. They were still a powerful company, still performing secret space experiments and who knew what else.  
   
You can’t win every battle, and they were all home and safe and living on a Goddard-supplied wage in exchange for _not_ trying to use the legal system (and possibly several illegal fires) to metaphorically and literally burn the company to the ground. It wasn’t nice, it wasn’t pretty, but they were alive and the four of them were still together. That had to be enough.  
   
It wasn’t.

* * *

   
She was chopping food for dinner when Lovelace flipped the chess board. (To be fair, Minkowski was pretty certain that Eiffel was flagrantly cheating).  
   
“Fuck this!” Lovelace said, standing up and shaking her head. “This is not what coming back to earth was supposed to be like. God, I have been sitting on this for _months,_ I am so goddamn sick of just waiting around for Goddard to decide we aren’t a threat anymore and just kill us. I cannot spend another second in this house.”  
   
There was a second of silence after her statement, broken by the sound of Hera coming down the stairs. “Did Eiffel try to steal your queen while you were moving he-her?”  
   
It had been… different to have Hera with them on Earth. Most of all for Hera herself, bound into an android form that she still hadn’t quite gotten used to. Trapped, utterly cut off from her past omniscience.  
   
Eiffel sat on the floor with the overturned chess board on his legs. “Hera, that was one time!”  
   
Lovelace sighed, leaving Eiffel and Hera to pace over to the kitchen. “Minkowski, I know you can’t be happy here either. This place is tiny and Goddard has us by the throat with contracts and your husband _fucking disappeared."_  
   
Minkowski stilled, the knife midway through a piece of chicken. “Lovelace.”  
   
“Look, I’m sorry I don’t want to pretend nothing ever happened before this, but I cannot sit here and play house for another ten years. I need to get out.” Lovelace was still pacing, taking up more space in the tiny kitchen than seemed possible.  
   
Minkowski breathed in once, twice, three times. Gripped her knife tighter. “Where?” she asked, imaging her voice steadier than it was. “Where can you possibly go that Goddard _isn’t?”_  
   
Lovelace shook her head. “I don’t know. I just know that I can’t stand this goddamn waiting.”  
   
The lights buzzed loud in the silence between the four people. Or maybe that was just Minkowski. Earth was so loud, so chaotic and messy. Not that the Hephaestus hadn’t been chaos incarnate, but it had been their whole world for three years.  
   
She couldn’t help but flinch away when Lovelace got too close, like the former captain would burn at her touch. The knife slipped from her hands, and there was a second of numb surprise before Minkowski realized she’d cut her finger and the sharp pain and blood made themselves evident all at once. She swore and spun away from the cutting board, sticking her finger under the faucet to wash it.  
   
Lovelace was asking her if she was okay.  
   
“Fine. Fine. Get me a band-aid and the Neosporin, will you?” Minkowski turned, calling over into the other room. “Eiffel, can you and Hera finish making dinner? It’s just chicken with some seasoning, everything’s already out on the counter. You just need to put the seasoning on and stick it in the oven, I promise I didn’t get any blood on it.”  
   
Minkowski was fine, it was just a little cut, she didn’t need any help. Dinner would get on the table and everyone would eat together and they would all be fine, and the water was running pink under her hands.  
   
“Minkowski! Minkowski, are you listening to me? Renée!”  
   
She snapped out of her reverie abruptly, meeting Lovelace’s eyes. “I’m fine,” she insisted, trusting the other woman not to push her any further.  
   
Lovelace had dark circles under her eyes like smudged ash, and gray undertones to her face that Minkowski wasn’t entirely sure weren’t mirrored in her own. “Give me your hand,” Lovelace said. “Just let me help for once, okay? I’m really not as incompetent as you might think.” Her words were sharp but her hands were gentle as she smoothed ointment over the wound and bandaged it efficiently.  
   
Minkowski steadied herself on the counter, closing her eyes, searching for a moment of rest. The buzzing of the lights still drilled into her skull, the dingy details of the room an aching bruise. God, she really did hate this place. Even if she might have brought it up differently than Lovelace, she could not say that she disagreed with her.  
   
“Let’s do it,” she murmured, eyes still closed. She felt rather than saw Lovelace’s reaction, the jerk in her hands and the intake of breath.  
   
“Do what?”  
   
“Get out of here.” Minkowski did open her eyes then, facing Lovelace and behind her, Eiffel and Hera. “All of us. Eiffel, you’ve got a car, right? We don’t need much, and this apartment is going to kill us before Goddard even tries if we don’t leave soon.”  
   
No reaction.  
   
“Besides,” Minkowski added, almost as an afterthought, “I’ve always wanted to visit the Grand Canyon.”  
   
There was another second of dumbfounded silence before Eiffel whooped and punched the air. “Hell yeah, road trip!”  
   
And then Eiffel was laughing and Hera was talking about car repairs they should do before they leave and when Minkowski looked at Lovelace, there was something in her face that looked a little like hope. It was unfamiliar. It was nice.

* * *

The first couple hours or so of driving blend into one another, a blur of highways and horizons passing too quickly to remember any details except the colors. Golden fields and gray roads, blue sky disappearing into the distance.  
   
Minkowski drives first, and since Eiffel beats Lovelace to the front passenger seat the car is filled with throwback tunes that came out before they had even left Earth for the first time.  
   
The windows are down, and the wind whips Minkowski’s hair into a tangled mess. Lovelace and Hera are hanging halfway out the back windows, laughing at a joke Minkowski can’t hear. Hera’s crackle-static giggle sparks like electricity and Lovelace’s raucous laugh rings out above the rushing wind.  
   
Sunlight is pouring in from every window, and it’s almost too bright to see but Minkowski can’t seem to be bothered by it. There’s a grin wide on her face and for the first time in months she feels like she can breathe. Eiffel’s got a map spread open on his lap - the car’s GPS had been broken when he bought it, and the idea of upgrading to a newer AI in the vehicle hadn’t appealed to any of them.  
   
Of course, he isn’t even looking at the map right now. Eiffel is twisted around to face Lovelace and Hera, shouting surprisingly accurate lyrics to Mr. Brightside and trying to get everyone else to sing along with him.  
   
Minkowski wasn’t going to sing along, but then the chorus starts up and she can’t help but belt out about coming out of your cage and you’ve been doing just fine, and everyone is breathless and singing and it feels like there’s no way this moment will ever end.  
   
It ends when they almost run out of gas on the interstate, and Minkowski has to practically roll the car into the gas station on momentum alone.  
   
Everyone piles out of the car on Lovelace’s insistence, because even if only one person has to fill the car up with gas everyone should stretch.  
   
“You know,” Hera says, “I don’t even have real mu-u-uscles. I’m not sure I really need to be doing this.”  
   
“You’ve got circuits, right? Don’t those need like, air or something?” This from Eiffel, yawning as he stretches his arms above his head.  
   
“I really don’t think that’s how it works.”  
   
The two of them keep talking - something about the convenience store food being addictive and how he has to show her the glory of Slurpees. She tunes them out in favor of trying to remember how to fill up her own gas. It’s been a long time since she’s had to do it. The muscle memory is somehow still there, though, and she figures it out without too much trouble.  
   
Even if she is a little distracted by Lovelace almost doing the splits during her stretches. God, that woman’s athleticism is unfair. Luckily for their car, the hose automatically disengages when the tank is full.  
   
She waves Lovelace over. “Come on, it’s your turn to drive.”  
   
“Where are we even going?”  
   
Minkowski shrugs. “I think Eiffel had circled some places on the map, we can check it out in the car. Speaking of, where did he and Hera go?”  
   
“They went into the store,” Lovelace answers, gesturing at the 7-11 attached to the tiny gas station. “I hope they grab some KitKats, I haven’t had any in forever.” She gets into the car as Minkowski hangs the hose up and hops into the passenger seat.  
   
“I could go for some of those strawberry hard candies,” Minkowski muses. Lovelace pulls the car out of the station, driving over to the front of the store.  
   
“Minkowski!” She’s trying for outraged but there’s laughter sneaking into her voice. “That is the most old-person candy you could have possibly chosen. I thought you were better than that.”  
   
“What makes a candy ‘old-person candy’?” Minkowski protests. “It tastes good, so it’s good.”  
   
As they argue, the doors to the store slide open and Hera walks out holding an unnaturally blue drink. It’s somehow even more neon than the actual glowing lights on her body. “Eiffel already left the store,” she says, carefully getting into the car. “I think he said he was going to take a nap in the back?”  
   
“He’s probably fine,” Lovelace says.  
   
Minkowski nods. “Eiffel once slept through a meteor shower. That man can sleep anywhere.”  
   
All of the women can testify to the truth of that. They head out of the station without a second thought, turning up an eighties disco-sounding track that tells them they gotta get moving to a town that’s grooving.  
   
They’ve been driving for an hour at least, Minkowski directing Lovelace along back roads filled with potholes and empty freeways. Tonight’s goal was, according to Eiffel’s practically illegible sharpie, somewhere in Kansas called “Cawker City”. As the sun begins to set, bloody rays of light stain the cornfields around them and the goal rapidly shifts to ‘the nearest motel’.  
   
“Hey, Eiffel,” Minkowski calls back, eyes trawling over the map in front of her. “Is this a food stain on the map or a lake?”  
   
There’s no response, and she twists around. Hera is napping on the side of the car, unfinished Slurpee tilting dangerously in one silver hand. Eiffel is nowhere to be seen, even when she cranes her neck to see over the bench seat in the back. “Eiffel!” she says again, louder. “I know you can hear me back there.”  
   
Minkowski is starting to get a bad feeling about this.  
   
“Hera, can you check if Eiffel’s knocked himself out or something?” she asks, reaching back to touch Hera’s knee. The android startles awake with a low whirr and a tilt of her head. In the low evening light, her eyes almost glow.  
   
“Hm? Yes, I’ll check,” she murmurs, and unbuckles her seatbelt to kneel on the seat and peer into the back.  
   
Minkowski waits.  
   
Lovelace has noticed her unbuckled passenger by this point, and glances over at Minkowski. “What’s up?”  
   
“Eiffel’s not responding. Do you think something fell on him?”  
   
“I mean, he does have a thick skull, he’s probably just really deeply asleep,” Lovelace says. “When’s the next exit to a town?”  
   
“Guys, we-we have a problem.” Hera leaned forward in between the two front chairs, drumming her fingers on the armrests. “Eiffel’s not in the back.”  
   
“What?”  
   
“He’s not!” Hera insisted. “I checked under and around everything, there’s no way he’s back there.”  
   
“Are you sure-” Minkowski starts, before Lovelace interrupts her.  
   
“Shit,” she says, swerving into a very illegal u-turn. “We left him at the gas station.”  
   
It’s a long drive back to the station.

* * *

_Eiffel’s Interlude_  
   
So he’d stopped in the bathroom for five whole minutes and they’d left him behind. He could deal with this, right? “I am a capable adult,” he told the chipmunk sitting on the curb next to him. “I can handle some waiting. Besides, they can’t forget about me for _forever.”_  
   
Five minutes later, Eiffel was physically, emotionally, and mentally prepared for death. He’d bought a packet of nuts to share with his new best friend, but ended up eating most of them himself. What could he say, a guy got hungry.  
   
“I don’t know if they’re ever coming back,” he said, staring at the pinkening sky above him. The tarmac was sticky-black heat under his head, and he was probably getting gravel in his hair. Whatever. “Chip, do you ever think about space? You know, I spent three years there, and I swear the past five minutes felt like a longer period of time.” He tossed one of the last salted almonds at the rodent. “It’s probably illegal to feed you, but you won’t tell anybody, right?”  
   
He checked his watch. Fifteen minutes since they’d left. How many stages of grief were there again? It felt like he’d already gone through all of them.  
   
“Maybe I should walk after them.”  
   
“Do you think Hera enjoyed her Slurpee? Blue raspberry is objectively the best flavor.” 

“Why is it blue, anyway? I asked Minkowski once. She just seems like she’d know weird facts like that. She told me it was so people like me wouldn’t confuse it with strawberry or cherry flavored candy, but that can’t be the only reason.”  
   
“I have zero signal, Chip, zero! Do you understand what this is doing to me? God, how are you even alive without wifi.”  
   
He checked his phone again. About forty five minutes since they’d left. He’d better stock up on snacks. 

* * *

When the van rolls back into the station, Eiffel is leaning against a peeling fire hydrant tossing candy at a chipmunk and it looks like he’s talking to it. There’s a pile of empty snack bags beside him and a grocery bag with what appears to be the store’s entire stock of peanut M &Ms inside. Also several empty Slurpees.  
   
Somehow, no one is surprised.  
   
Minkowski somehow gets stuck with wrangling a sugar-buzzed and sun-addled Eiffel into the car again, which ends up with him draped over the front passenger seat and her crammed into the seat behind him. He steadfastly ignores (or quite possibly is too sleepy to feel) her knees jabbing she hopes deep into his spine, and never moves his chair any further forward.  
   
Lovelace drives for another couple of hours, drives until the sky and fields begin to melt into trees and the dark makes all of it identical. The headlights barely pierce the darkness in front of them, and they keep veering a little closer to the opposite lane than Minkowski is comfortable with.  
   
The music is quiet, something guitar-driven and classic that’s still not upbeat enough to keep anyone actually awake. She reaches forward, touches Lovelace on the shoulder. “Wanna pull over? Eiffel’s in no state to navigate, and I don’t think we’re gonna make it to a rest stop anytime soon.”  
   
Lovelace just blinks at her. The harsh angles of her face seem softer here, nothing but moonlight and the faint glow of the dash display on the car for illumination. “I… Yeah.” She pulls over without issue, turning off the car. “I’m probably not going to sleep,” she says, more casual than her words deserve. “I don’t much anymore. You should drive tomorrow.”  
   
Minkowski just nods, and even though Lovelace can probably barely see her in the darkness she thinks the other woman understands.  
   
The leather of the car seat is cracked and rough under her skin, and Minkowski’s worried she’s not going to sleep either. But apparently she’s more tired than she thought she was, and what can’t be more than a few minutes pass before she falls asleep listening to Eiffel snore and Hera whirr next to her. Lovelace shifts in the driver’s seat, and Minkowski hopes she’ll get at least a little sleep. 

* * *

_Hera Interlude_  
   
Hera woke up before the sun rose, processors whirring to life as she slowly sat upright. She grimaced slightly, the expression an automatic response to her discomfort despite not having had a face for most of her life. The Slurpee yesterday had not been a great idea - having taste receptors did not mean that your new body could break down food particularly well.  
   
She stretched, letting warmth seep back into her limbs. It didn’t look like anyone else was awake just yet, and so the android let herself have this moment for herself.  
   
Earth was nice, but it was so strange. It had never been a home for her the way it had been for the three others.  
   
Maybe that meant she was lucky. She didn’t have the constant spectre of her past following her on these highways and reminding her of the things she once had on this tiny planet. No, she just had it closer than her own shadow.  
   
She felt so small, sometimes. Having hands was nice. And a face. But every step was a reminder of the way she once orbited a star system, every blink was another moment she couldn’t see anything when she used to be able to see everything.  
   
Hera opened the door of the car as quietly as she could, slipping into the cool dawn air. Scrubby pines lined the sides of the road, only just darker than the sky itself.  
   
Over her head, the Milky Way scattered the stars in the sky.  
   
She couldn’t see the colors anymore. Her new optics were based almost entirely on human eyes, and the solar storms and ultraviolet energies were lost to her now.  
   
Behind her, one of the other doors on the car opened and shut. Hera had to turn and see who it was, she had to move this physical form step by step to change her point of view. Eiffel.  
   
“Hey, Hera. What are you doing awake?”  
   
She shrugged. “I don’t ne-eed as much sleep as the rest of you.” He walked over to her, leaning against the side of the car. The metal was cool, even to Hera, and Eiffel was only in a t-shirt and shorts. He must have been really cold.  
   
Hera felt like she should offer him her coat, but she didn’t have one. Instead she exerted the small amount of control she did have over this form to turn up her internal temperature, hoping the warmth would reach her friend.  
   
“Do you ever miss the stars?” she asked. The question popped out before she was even aware she was thinking it, her eyes locked on the sky that stretched out above the two of them. It was endless.  
   
Eiffel shook his head. “No.”  
   
“Not even a little?” Hera knew her voice was wistful, and it took a lot of self control not to reach out towards the sky. The stars seemed so far away, and she missed the warmth of Wolf 359 on the Hephaestus more than she would like to admit.  
   
Eiffel looked at her.  
   
Hera looked back, abandoning the stars for a chance to really see this man who almost tore the ship apart to get her back home with them. His eyes were so dark, and his hair was all sticking up on one side where he slept on it wrong.  
   
“Dance with me?” he asked.  
   
“What?”  
   
He was smiling at her, teeth white against the dark night. “Yeah, I always said I would teach you to dance, didn’t I? Can’t leave my best girl hanging like that.”  
   
She always was a sucker for that smile. That was another good thing about this body: now she could smile back, and when he reached out to take her hand she could give it to him. Eiffel started humming, an offbeat rhythm but Hera couldn’t find it in herself to care.  
   
It was just the two of them on the road. Eiffel lead her in what he said was a box step, spinning the two of them across the tarmac. She tripped over his feet and her own multiple times, but every time he was still there.  
   
As they danced, Eiffel slowly started to speed up the tempo to match the song he was singing. He spun Hera out, and then back in again, and she was breathless and happy and the stars had nothing on this feeling. “You’re too good at this,” he said in between verses of his song. “Gonna put me to shame and you’ve only been dancing for a few minutes.”  
   
“Well,” Hera said, “I did have a pretty-etty great teacher.”  
   
When he started singing the chorus again, Hera began to sing with him. They slowed again, shuffling back and forth across the country road. The two of them and the stars, watching in silent jealousy of their dance. “They were singing, ‘Bye bye Miss American Pie’, drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry…” 

* * *

"No, it’s definitely the next exit.”  
   
“Are you sure it’s not the one after? I studied the map more than you did, Lovelace. The next exit is nothing but a cattle town.”  
   
“I swear I saw a sign that said the nearest restaurant just off the next exit.”  
   
“I’m driving, I see _all_ the signs and that was definitely not one of them.” 

"Minkowski, just trust me. It’s the next exit.” 

"Are we there yet?”

“Shut up, Eiffel!”  
   
“Shut up, Eiffel!”  
   
Minkowski sighed, staring at the dull road that stretched out for miles in front of them. They were somewhere in Kansas. Somewhere that they couldn’t seem to find anywhere on their paper map. No one could get a signal on their phones.  
   
They’d been driving on this back highway for hours now, confusing signage and lack of visible cities in the distance driving them ever forward.  
   
Minkowski could have sworn she’d packed food for all of them somewhere in the car, but it was nowhere to be found. Eiffel had started describing different pizzas to Hera at about the two hour mark, and had promptly been banned from doing so exactly three minutes later. It was too late by then, and the three of them who needed to eat could not get the thought of fresh pizza out of their minds.  
   
Everyone was hungry, sore from sleeping in the car, and the gas gauge was dipping ominously low.  
   
(This not even mentioning the general irritability that still hung around after the Incident this morning with a single song playing on repeat until Lovelace and Minkowski threatened to throw Eiffel’s CD out the window. He’d assured them it was a one-off joke and played another song, and all was well.  
   
When ‘What’s New Pussycat’ started playing again just after the new song ended…  
   
Yeah. That incident.)  
   
“Look,” Minkowski said, struggling to keep her voice level. “We have no idea where we are, not even Hera is getting a satellite signal, and you have _never been here._ There is no way in hell you know it’s the next exit.”  
   
“Please don’t bring m-me into this,” Hera interjected.  
   
“No, see, if you look at this map you can see there’s only forests on the far North-East edge of Kansas, and we’ve definitely driven through forested areas today. And then there’s a couple highways in this area but if you compare their distances from each other with the angle of-”  
   
“Whatever you are about to say, no.”  
   
Lovelace shook her head, staring at the map stretched across the dash in front of her. “I’m telling you, take exit nine in about ten miles to get onto U.S. Highway 24, and Cawker City will be right there. We’ve gone too far to stop somewhere else.”  
   
Minkowski eased the car around a tight turn in the road, revealing a small off-ramp just ahead. “Let’s just get off here, we can spend the night in a cheap hotel and visit the - Eiffel, what’s in Cawker City again?”  
   
“Huh?” Eiffel looked up.  
   
“Cawker City? You circled it on the map and drew a vaguely circular scribble and some stars next to it.”  
   
“Oh, yeah! It’s the world’s largest ball of twine.”  
   
Minkowski almost slammed on the brakes exiting onto the smaller road, jerking everyone in the car forward. “It’s what.”  
   
“Eiffel, you can’t be serious. Also, there’s no exit marked on this highway here…” Lovelace was still studying the map, tracing the road lines with one finger.  
   
“My middle name is serious!”  
   
“Actually,” Hera piped up, “I’m pretty sure it’s Fernand. And if we don’t know what road we’re on, how do we know there’s no exit here?”  
   
Lovelace shook her head. “I still think we could make it to Cawker, even if it’s just a ridiculous tourist trap it’s got to have some good hotels or restaurants there. Who knows what’s out here!”  
   
The small road Minkowski had exited onto was just getting smaller, weaving through stands of trees and over hills Minkowski could have sworn she hadn’t seen on the horizon before. It was getting late, and she’d been driving for hours. They just hadn’t noticed them. 

"There’s a sign!” Eiffel said, pointing at the side of the road. “‘Welcome to Roanoke, America’s friendliest small town’. They’ve gotta have somewhere we can stay.”  
   
True enough, there was a faded green sign. The text was hardly readable, rusting into nothingness as they read it.  
   
Buildings started appearing as Minkowski drove further into the town, and the sight quieted all of them in the car. It wasn’t abandoned, per se. There was just a sense here, a feeling of dust blowing in through open windows and scrubby plants growing through cracks in the pavement, a place where nature had come back to tell the people living there that _‘You can’t have this, you never could.’_  
   
The sun hung low in the sky, bright afternoon light catching on anything reflective and distorting the scenery. There were few people in the town, but it was a very small place. This was probably normal.  
   
It was quiet in the car, a stillness developing that everyone was loathe to break.  
   
The CD still played on low; it skipped and repeated over ‘such a lovely place, such a lovely face’ until Lovelace turned it off and there was nothing but their breathing and the soft whirr of Hera’s processors.  
   
Buildings blended into each other, all different shapes and sizes but remaining that same dull brown color. Even so, the neon sign proclaiming Roanoke Motel to be open snuck up on Minkowski, and she almost missed the turn.  
   
The parking lot was moderately full, which was almost more surprising than it would have been if it was empty. Roanoke seemed tiny - what were these people coming to see?  
   
The silence remained as Minkowski pulled into an empty spot in the lot. Eiffel was the one to break it, with an uneasy glance at the cars around them. “I’m not the only one getting a distinctly Hotel California vibe from this, right?”  
   
“We’re in Kansas, Eiffel,” Minkowski said, pretending that she did not agree with him wholeheartedly. “California is thousands of miles away.”  
   
When Minkowski checked to make sure Lovelace and Hera were still following her to the lobby of the motel, Lovelace was grinning almost too happily.  
   
“You know what,” Lovelace announced, louder than was probably wise. “I agree with Eiffel - this place is definitely haunted.” Her words echoed off the metal cars and tarmac in ways that didn’t sound quite natural, and her smile faltered for a fraction of a second. 

"Now wait a second, I _never_ said ‘haunted’-”  
   
“Yeah, but you meant it.” Lovelace’s grin was back in full force, and she walked up next to Minkowski and Hera to sling her arms around their shoulders. “Maybe this stop wasn’t such a bad idea. Completely unrelated, have I ever told you about the haunted campground a couple of my friends and I stayed at when we were in the academy?”  
   
_“Please don’t."_

* * *

The front desk attendant had been normal.  
   
The room they’d reserved was normal, if a bit dusty.  
   
There was nothing weird about this motel.  
   
Minkowski blamed Lovelace and Eiffel for the shivers crawling up the back of her neck when she had to leave the hotel room to try and see if she could get the wifi password from the front desk. This place was fine, it didn’t matter that the front desk was locked up and it couldn’t be past six pm yet. She was just on edge because Eiffel and Lovelace had just been retelling every horror story they could think of for the past couple of hours, over flat soda and pizza from a store not even Eiffel with all his pizza experience had heard of.  
   
That would put anyone a little off.  
   
The sun seemed to set faster than it had the evening before, bare fingers of light grasping onto the sky like a skeletal hand to no avail.  
   
It was dark by the time Minkowski returned to their room. There were two beds and a fold-out sofa, which Hera had volunteered to take as the one least affected by uncomfortable sleeping conditions.  
   
Right now, all three of them were piled onto the corner bed with all of the pillows and blankets from the other bed and the couch. “I saw it then,” Lovelace was saying. “And it saw me. Just- this black shape, kneeling in the corner of my tent. It was only vaguely humanoid, but I swear to god it knew exactly what I was thinking when we made eye contact.”  
   
“And what were you thinking?” Minkowski asked, startling the three people on the bed.  
   
Lovelace grinned a little sheepishly. “I was hoping that the pretty girl in the tent across from mine hadn’t heard me scream like a kid.”  
   
Minkowski laughed. “Understandable.” She stood at the side of the bed, regarding the nest of blankets and pillows that currently held her friends. “As cozy as this looks, I can’t be the only one who would like some actual space to stretch out.”  
   
The others agreed.  
   
At least for the moment.  
   
They split up the bedding materials equally - if not exactly organized. Some of the pillows that were probably meant for the couch ended up on one of the beds and the sheets were a lost cause.  
   
Lovelace got a bed to herself by virtue of volunteering to be tomorrow’s main driver, which left Eiffel and Minkowski in the other bed and as planned Hera on the couch.  
   
That is, until Minkowski felt the bed shifting to one side, and she sat up before she was even fully awake. A fuzzy figure glowed softly a few feet away and Minkowski immediately started trying to backpedal through the bed frame and the wall and into the next room and preferably the next continent because _she did not sign up for ghosts._  
   
And then she blinked a couple of times and her vision cleared and there was Hera, putting a finger to her lips and motioning at a still-sleeping Eiffel with her free hand. “Couldn’t sleep,” she murmured. “Can… Can I stay here?”  
   
Minkowski was nowhere near enough of an asshole to tell Hera no, and obligingly scooted over to the side of the bed to let Hera get in.  
   
It was actually pretty nice - the motel room was oddly chilly, and Hera tended to generate ambient heat even when she was asleep. Minkowski couldn’t help but roll a little closer, and judging from the way the mattress sank in towards the middle, Eiffel was probably doing the same on the other side.  
   
She yawned and blinked once, twice, and sleep crept in through a crack in the door.  
   
Something woke Minkowski again later that night. The clock on the bedside table was no help. It had read the same time ever since they’d arrived: 1:14 AM in blinking red numbers.  
   
She sat up, listening carefully. Someone was breathing hard, harsh and panicky. It wasn’t Eiffel or Hera, they were still asleep.  
   
There was only one other person in the room.  
   
Hopefully.  
   
“Lovelace,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”  
   
Minkowski heard nothing in return, not even a change in the breathing. She stood and made her way over to the other bed. Her eyes adjusted slowly, taking in the dim red light from the bedside clock and the bare glow of a streetlamp through the cracks in the blinds.

Lovelace was curled into a ball in the center of the bed, above the covers with eyes squeezed shut and breathing loud and fast. Minkowski reached out without thinking, grabbing the other woman’s shoulder. “Lovelace, wake up!” she whispered as loud as she dared. “Isabel!”  
   
The former captain snapped awake, flinging out her hand violently in Minkowski’s direction. Minkowski jerked away, just missed being punched in the face. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s just me,” she said. “Renée Minkowski. We’re on Earth and we’re safe, L-Isabel. You did it.”  
   
“Sam?”  
   
She’d never heard Lovelace’s voice break quite like this. “No, Isabel. It’s just me.” Minkowski sat on the edge of the bed, risked reaching out to touch Lovelace’s shoulder again. “You’re with Douglas Eiffel, Hera, and I. We’re in a small town motel, and we’re all safe. I promise.”  
   
Lovelace shook her head, pushing herself to sit upright. “I saw him, Minkowski, I saw Sam. Lambert. He looked… He looked exactly the same.” She was leaning into Minkowski without even seeming to realize it, her whole body shivering. “He was pissed at me for calling him Sam when he was fucking dying, he was my best goddamn friend in the end and I let him die in front of me and I swear I saw him standing here and frowning at me just like he used to.”  
   
“It was just a dream, Lovelace,” Minkowski said.  
   
She kind of wanted to call her Isabel again. She liked the way the name sounded on her lips. Dominik was probably dead and Minkowski hadn’t worn her wedding ring since she left Earth for the first time all those years ago, and Lovelace was still shaking in her arms.  
   
“I don’t dream anymore,” Lovelace muttered. Minkowski heard her intake of breath, heard the beginnings of a word. But Lovelace said nothing more, just shook her head again and pressed closer to Minkowski.  
   
“Hey,” Minkowski whispered after a long moment. She felt more afraid than she maybe should to ask this, but Lovelace was stone and steel and sparks. An unstoppable force that moved immovable objects.  
   
Lovelace was also breathing like someone who was trying very, very hard not to cry, and it was that hitch in her breath that convinced Minkowski to keep talking.  
   
“Eiffel, Hera, and I are in the other bed, but if you want to join..."

"Why, Renée Minkowski, are you propositioning a good girl like myself?” Lovelace murmured, more into Minkowski’s shoulder than at Minkowski directly. It made it easier for her and Minkowski to pretend neither of them heard the fear behind her bravado.  
   
“In your dreams,” Minkowski teased, guiding Lovelace up and over to the other bed. _And maybe in mine,_ she would never admit to having thought.  
   
The four of them barely fit onto the motel bed, and the frame creaked ominously. It was worth the squeeze, in Minkowski’s opinion. Sure, having space to breathe was nice, but it was nothing compared to Hera’s gentle warmth against her back and Eiffel’s arm thrown over both of them and Lovelace curled against her other side, slowly falling back asleep.  
   
It was even worth the morning, when Lovelace and Minkowski’s hair tangled together so tightly that it took ten minutes for them to be able to separate their heads and Eiffel somehow kneed Minkowski in the stomach while still being on the other side of Hera, and Hera herself was almost burning up in the center of the bed.  
   
Hera went to return their key, but returned with the report that the front desk was locked tight. They had left most of their stuff in the car, so it was the work of a few minutes to grab phone chargers and wallets and head back out into the daylight. The parking lot was, if anything, more full than it had been the previous night. There was still no one else to be seen.  
   
No sound seemed to reach this place, not cars from the passing roads or birds nesting in trees.  
   
It was oppressive, and the atmosphere in the car as Lovelace drove them out of the motel’s lot was hushed. Eiffel had jumped into the front seat before Minkowski could, and he reached over to play his CD.  
   
‘And still those voices are calling from far, far away. They wake you up in the middle of the night, just to hear them sa-’  
   
Eiffel skipped to the next song.  
   
The road out of town was rougher than Minkowski remembered - almost like gravel, plants sprouting in every rut and pothole. She must have been sleepier than she remembered, if she’d missed all this.  
   
They never did see that Welcome To Roanoke Sign on their way out of town. But they did make it out of town, and just as Lovelace had said yesterday - ten miles later, there was exit nine to Highway 24.  
   
“I was thinking,” Lovelace mused as she navigated onto the highway. “Since we were on the road that I thought we were, that means that I was right when I said there was no exit there on the map.”  
   
“Are we cursed now?” Eiffel asked. “You know, ‘do not look at goblin men, do not eat their fruits’? I think we ate their pizza. And slept in their motel.”  
   
Minkowski slumped back in her seat. “At this point, I don’t think I have any objections to that.”  
   
Hera was staring out the window, watching the plains roll past. “If we are cursed,” she said. “I want to see the World’s Largest Ball Of-o-of Twine before I die or get st-stolen by ghosts.”  
   
“Your wish is my command,” Lovelace said. “Eiffel, get out the map and make sure we’re not going to get trapped in another creepy town like that.”  
   
“On it!" 

* * *

"I ki-kind of thought the largest ball of twine in the world would be, I don’t know. Larger?” Hera stood in the shadow of the ball - which, to be fair, was at least two Heras tall.  
   
Eiffel leaned against her shoulder, looking at the immense pile of twine in front of them. “Yeah,” he agreed. “It’s large right now, sure, but I was expecting something a little more Godzilla style of large and a little less Godzilla Junior sized.”  
   
“I bet I could get to the top in about ten seconds,” Lovelace mused. She laid her hands across the surface, testing the steadiness of it.  
   
“Bet I could do it in five,” Minkowski said. The brown-gray ball of twine sat beneath an open-air gazebo, and there was plenty of room between the top of the ball and the roof for someone to get on top of it.  
   
“You’re on!”  
   
“If anyone asks, we don’t know you two,” Eiffel announced to no one. Probably luckily for Minkowski and Lovelace’s bet, there weren’t any other tourists around the ball at the time.  
   
“Hey, there’s a gift shop over there!” Hera tugged on Eiffel’s arm, pointing at a bright blue building with a circular sign painted to look like the ball of twine. “Let’s go before they get us all kicked out.”  
   
“We won’t get kicked out,” Minkowski claimed. She took a second to size up the ball in front of her - Minkowski was not a tall woman, but neither was Lovelace. The twine looked to be wound tightly enough to hold weight, and she just had to figure out the optimal route-Lovelace had already jumped onto the sphere.  
   
Minkowski followed suit, digging her toes into the string for footholds and propelling herself up as fast as she could. She couldn’t see Lovelace on the other side of the ball, but she could hear her. Both women were breathing hard.  
   
The surface was leveling out beneath Minkowski’s hands. She was almost to the top. As she climbed, she kept her head down, eyes on the twine, ensuring she wouldn’t miss a step.  
   
Lovelace’s head smacked into her own, and both of them had to stop moving and grab onto the ball to avoid falling off.  
   
Minkowski was the first to catch her breath, and she carefully folded her legs underneath her so that she could sit on the top. “Beat you.”  
   
Lovelace looked up at her, eyes big and bright and so goddamn alive. She was smiling, almost beaming. Her face was flushed and her breathing was coming fast, and something about the sight made Minkowski’s heart flip.  
   
“Who won?” Eiffel shouted up at the two of them, and the moment was broken.  
   
Eiffel and Hera stood at the bottom of the ball, looking up at Lovelace and Minkowski.  
   
“I did!” the two women said at the same time.  
   
Lovelace glared at Minkowski. “I definitely got to the top before you did.”  
   
Minkowski shook her head. “We got here at the same time, that’s why we ran into each other.”  
   
“You ran into each other?” Hera asked. She giggled. “I wi-ish I could have seen that.”  
   
“And even _if_ you got here first,” Minkowski continued, pretending she hadn’t heard Hera laugh at her. “You started before me, it wasn’t a fair race.”  
   
Lovelace shrugged. “All’s fair in love and war.”  
   
“Hey!"

The four of them froze.

On the other side of the road, an older woman had just left her house. “You can’t climb on that!"

"We could stay and face repercussions for our actions,” Minkowski suggested, deadpan. 

"Repercussions are for squares,” Lovelace said, and she grabbed Minkowski’s hand and pulled her down off the ball. “Let’s go!"

Running across the parking lot with midday sun burning the back of her neck, Lovelace’s hand still in hers… It was more alive than Minkowski had felt in months.

A metallic clang sounded behind her, and when she risked a glance over one shoulder Hera had tripped over a crack in the pavement. Eiffel had already stopped to help her, and for a brief glorious moment tried to pick her up. And then gravity remembered that Eiffel was a skinny human man and Hera was literally made of metal, and instead of lifting Hera Eiffel tripped over her and they both ended up in a pile on the ground.

"Man down, man down!” he shouted.

Lovelace and Minkowski paused and shared a glance.

They kept running. Really, Minkowski justified to herself, this was the best decision. If they got to the car they could swing it around and pick up Eiffel and Hera and get out of there far faster than they could if it was just them running.

Eiffel and Hera detangled from each other and were back on their feet by the time Lovelace and Minkowski made it to the car. The woman who had yelled at them was getting closer by the second and still yelling – something about a giftshop? Minkowski had forgotten that there was a gift shop.

They’d be out of here before she could even remember their license plate, it would be fine. 

Lovelace pulled out of the parking spot as fast as she dared, driving over to Eiffel and Hera so they could jump in the car. She peeled out of the lot so fast that Minkowski would bet they left black rubber streaks on the pavement. 

On the highway once more, the occupants of the car were quiet. Then Eiffel held up one hand closed into a fist, and opened it to reveal a palm-sized snowglobe. “I think I accidentally stole a snowglobe,” he said, and that was all it took to break the silence.  
   
Everyone was talking over each other, laughing and grinning. Eiffel leaned forward, stretching to turn on the music. ‘I wanna get better!’ began to blast from the speakers, and Minkowski closed her eyes. The wind was whipping through the open windows, and the car was filled with sunlight and sound and joy. 

* * *

They spend the rest of that day driving through Kansas and Colorado, taking turns driving. Hera can’t seem to stop herself from announcing whenever she sees horses, and each time Minkowski remembers that there is so much Hera knows but so little she has experienced of Earth and its vibrance. Fields turn into forests, and gradually the flat landscape breaks and rises, Colorado’s rockier scenery making itself apparent.  
   
Evening has fallen by the time the Rocky Mountains are visible on the horizon, and everyone has driven for over four hours. Eiffel and Hera are fast asleep in the back.  
   
Minkowski drives now, checking the map every few minutes for lack of anything else to do. Lovelace is napping on and off, face pressed against the passenger window. Hopefully they’ll reach the Grand Canyon late tomorrow.  
   
But Minkowski keeps yawning, and the road is twisting up onto a stony plateau. She’s not alert enough to be driving and she knows it, but if she can just ignore it for a little longer, make it a little further…  
   
She’s almost asleep at the wheel when Lovelace shakes her shoulder and wakes her up.  
   
“Minkowski,” Lovelace says, and then, quieter. “Renée.” The lights in the car are on low, barely illuminating the other woman.  
   
The curve of Lovelace’s face in the near-darkness. The sound of her name on Lovelace’s lips. The thrum of the car under her feet. Minkowski stops almost without realizing it, pulls onto a gravel lookout point without taking her eyes off of Lovelace.  
   
She thinks of her wedding ring, in a box in her suitcase in the back. She thinks of the last time she saw Dominik, and how easy it is for Goddard to do whatever they want and have no one notice a thing.  
   
She thinks of Lovelace, saying her name again.  
   
“Renée,” Lovelace whispers, like she’s reading Minkowski’s mind. “I want to show you something.”  
   
And she leaves the car, and Minkowski follows. What else could she have done? Lovelace leads her to the side of the car, offers a hand up and then they’re on top of the car.  
   
There’s not a lot of space, but neither of them mind. They’re leaning into each other, seeking something less tangible than the simple presence of another person.  
   
“What did you want to show me?” Minkowski murmurs, because she cannot think of anything she’d rather see than Lovelace, right here and now.  
   
“This.” Lovelace gestures at the sky above them and the ground below; the unimaginable expanse of stars and the finite rock and forest reside in harmony. “We’ve been driving through this all day, but we haven’t stopped just to look at it. Rest stops and fast food places don’t count.”  
   
There’s more stars than humanity could ever visit, and what seems like the same amount of trees. “It’s beautiful,” Minkowski says, and she’s not going to cry but something in her heart twists all the same. She can’t believe she went three years without seeing a mountain or a tree, and Lovelace was trapped in space for even longer than that - she can’t imagine what it must be like for her. Minkowski lets her head fall against Lovelace’s shoulder and takes her hand. “Thank you.”  
   
She feels rather than sees Lovelace turn to face her, and when Minkowski lifts her head Lovelace is so close she can feel the warmth of her skin and see the details of her face even through the darkness. (The circles under her eyes hang heavy, but her smile is fierce and strong and Minkowski thinks she might love this woman.)  
   
“Can I…” Minkowski begins, and then Lovelace is kissing her.  
   
The stars disappear. Lovelace’s lips are warm, and her hands cupping Minkowski’s face are cool. They shift closer. Closer again, and Minkowski puts a hand down to steady herself and almost falls off of the car.  
   
“Maybe we should move somewhere less precarious,” she suggests, and Lovelace laughs softly.  
   
“Spoilsport. It’s nice up here.”  
   
“It would also be nice not to fall on my ass while kissing you,” Minkowski points out.  
   
“I thought you already fell for me,” Lovelace teases, and she leans forward to press her forehead against Minkowski’s.  
   
Minkowski wants to say something witty back, but she can’t seem to think of anything other than tilting her head and catching Lovelace’s lips with her own again.  
   
They don’t end up going back inside the car. Minkowski lies back, lets her feet dangle over the windshield and hopes she doesn’t smudge it too badly. Lovelace can’t seem to sit still, gesturing at the trees surrounding them and telling Minkowski about how when she was a girl she’d wanted to be a park ranger. She still remembered that, even so many years later. Minkowski tells Lovelace about how she never got a speaking part in her high school plays, there was always someone more in tune or prettier or less intense. They kiss, again and again.  
   
At some point they sleep, wrapped up in each other to avoid falling off the side of the car. 

* * *

Morning dawns slow, hazy like rising smoke. There’s an ache in Minkowski’s neck and several mosquito bites on her arms, but she’s nestled into Lovelace’s side and the other woman’s warmth makes it worth it. She props herself up on one arm and leans over.  
   
“Good morning, Isabel.”  
   
Lovelace makes an incoherent sound and reaches out. Minkowski doesn’t know what she’s trying to do, because it looks like she’s just shoving her hand in Minkowski’s face.  
   
“Real morning person, aren’t you?” Minkowski laughs.  
   
She leans over and kisses Lovelace again, because this is a thing she’s allowed to do now and Minkowski can’t believe she denied herself it for so long. They both have gross morning breath, and Minkowski makes a face as she pulls away. “We have toothbrushes in our suitcases, right?”  
   
Lovelace makes another incoherent sound, and Minkowski smiles and shakes her head. “I’ll check.”  
   
She jumps off the roof of the car, wincing as her feet hit the ground. The car door doesn’t open and she fishes the keys from her pocket. The unlock button on the electronic keypad doesn’t work, no matter how many times Minkowski hits the button. She ends up having to unlock it manually with the key. “Good morning, sunshines!” she says to Eiffel and Hera, who seem to be having a drowsy conversation about the merits of various sci-fi series.  
   
“Hey, Minkowski,” Eiffel responds, and yawns. “Can you turn on the car? It’s getting cold in here.”  
   
“You know, I can regulate my body heat,” Hera says. Eiffel leans into her, sighing happily.  
   
“This is why you’re my favorite.”  
   
Minkowski tries to turn on the car anyway - they’re probably going to leave soon.  
   
It doesn’t turn on. The engine doesn’t even turn over.  
   
They’d had an almost full tank of gas last night; the car had been holding together well for the entire trip. She tries again. And again.  
   
The fourth time Minkowski turns the key in vain, she notices a switch flipped on the dashboard. The lights in the car - and she remembers, last night, the flickering lights barely illuminating Lovelace’s face. They hadn’t turned off the lights before they’d gone outside.  
   
“Fuck,” she says.  
   
It seems like the right time to say it.  
   
“Wait here, guys,” she tells Eiffel and Hera, and closes the car door. “Isabel!” she calls up. “It’s time to get up.”  
   
Lovelace rolls off the van more than jumps, stumbling to her feet in front of Minkowski. “We heading out?” Her sleepy mumble is distractingly cute, but Minkowski has to stay focused.  
   
“We can’t.”  
   
At those words, Lovelace looks distinctly more awake and less happy. “What?”  
   
“I mean we can’t! We left the car lights on last night and the battery’s dead.”  
   
Lovelace turns away, facing the car. The edges of a frown are just visible in her silhouette, and Minkowski sees her lips move as she mumbles. “Yeah, sure, _we.”_  
   
“What do you mean, _we?”_ Minkowski snaps before she can stop herself.  
   
“Nothing, nothing,” Lovelace says, but there’s a sharpness in the way she’s holding herself and the tone of her voice. Minkowski thinks that if she touches her, she might bleed.  
   
“Aren’t we past this?” Minkowski tries, aiming for defusing and landing more in nuclear territory.  
   
“Past what, Minkowski?” Lovelace is facing her now, and whatever’s on her face does not look like anger but Minkowski is too used to the animosity that they’ve had and not familiar at all with what they could have now. “You were driving last night, you should have remembered to turn off the lights,” Lovelace continues. “I’m sorry I didn’t remind you, but it is not my fault.”  
   
“Does it have to be anyone’s fault?” Minkowski asks. Her voice is too loud for a casual discussion.  
   
“I was just saying-” Lovelace begins, but Minkowski is tired and angry and afraid and cannot seem to make her mouth stop saying words.  
   
Someone always got into fights on road trips like these. Cramped quarters and gas station food would drive anyone up the wall given enough time. Minkowski hadn’t thought it would be her, but the universe never did listen to her preconceptions of it.  
   
“Just saying- You’re _always_ just saying!” Minkowski shouts. “Every goddamn time, you just say something that’s going to break someone else, you did it on the Hephaestus and you do it here. ‘Oh, I think Hera’s going to kill us all because nothing on this station works’, ‘Hey Kepler what if I blow you up with this bomb here’, ‘Minkowski have you ever thought about what Goddard must have done to your- to your-’” There are hot tears rolling down Minkowski’s face. She’s not sure when they started to fall, but she can’t make them stop. “Fuck this,” she whispers, and walks away.  
   
She’s overreacting, probably. Whatever. Minkowski deserves some goddamn time to overreact. Being the reasonable one all of the time is a job and a half.  
   
The edge of the lookout point they’ve parked on is marked by a short steel fence, and Minkowski leans over it and stares out at the rocks and forests that stretch out beneath. It’s gorgeous. It’s solid and real, something that lies unaffected by the ache in Minkowski’s heart and the weight on her shoulders.  
   
Lovelace doesn’t come after her.  
   
She doesn’t know what the other woman is doing, doesn’t turn to try and see. It feels like a competition now, even if Minkowski has no idea whether Lovelace is actually participating in it. Who can be the angriest for the shittiest reason? Cast your votes here, at a lookout point in the middle of nowhere.  
   
Minkowski wants to be mad at Lovelace, wants to shout at her for not thinking before she speaks or assuming that people will go along with what she says. But she still wants to kiss her, for every unplanned moment when Minkowski felt alive and real because she was doing something incredibly dumb that Lovelace had suggested, for letting Minkowski not have to be The One Who Makes Decisions for once in her goddamn life.  
   
She can probably want both things.  
   
Something zaps behind Minkowski. The sound would not have been out of place as a cheap laser sound effect in a cheesy sci-fi movie, and it is immediately followed by the rumble of the car engine starting up and a thump.  
   
Minkowski turns, and the scene in front of her definitely looks like something out of a cheesy sci-fi movie. The car is running, with the hood up and Eiffel tumbling out of the front seat like it’s on fire. Hera is lying on the ground in front of the car, with _the fucking jumper cables clipped onto her and then the car._ It’s a little like some car commercial remake of Frankenstein.  
   
Hera is not moving.  
   
Minkowski’s body responds before her brain, running over to where the android lay on the ground. But first-aid classes were really meant more for creatures of blood and muscle, and Minkowski can’t check Hera’s breathing or heartbeat. Eiffel beats her to figuring out what she can check, and she’s still sitting on the ground feeling useless when he bends over to press his ear to Hera’s chest.  
   
“I can still hear, like, whirring,” he says. “She’s fine, right? She’s gotta be fine. She said she’d be fine, she said she wouldn’t even notice it. Hera, please, talk to me, you said you’d be fine-"

"Eiffel,” Minkowski interjects, her voice gentle but firm. “Her lights are still on, see? And you heard whirring, which means she has not shut down.” Remind him of what is tangible, of the things he can prove. Wherever Minkowski is, however she is feeling, there are some things she will never forget. Pryce and Carter’s Deep Space Survival Tips, the drop in her stomach when she was rejected by NASA time and time again, the first time she saw the earth from orbit. And how to talk Doug Eiffel down from a panic attack. “Can you go get Lovelace?” she asks. Tell him to do something, something simple but helpful. It will help.  
   
He nods, mutely. Takes Hera’s hand, presses it to his lips.  
   
Minkowski feels like she should look away, but she needs to stay to help Hera into the car. After a moment, Eiffel gets up carefully, and walks off to go find Lovelace.  
   
She takes a deep breath. _Just keep breathing, just keep walking. Eventually you’ll get somewhere._ Hera is too heavy for Minkowski to lift off the ground, no matter how she tries. She doesn’t want to drag her, that feels inappropriate.  
   
She can’t think of what to do. Her mind is blanking in a way it usually doesn’t, and she ends up getting in the driver’s seat and moving the car until the passenger door is next to where Hera lies. And then she waits. Eiffel’s CD starts up, and it’s jaunty and upbeat and something about how the singer is still standing. Minkowski turns it off.  
   
The knock on the window when Eiffel returns, a stone-faced Lovelace in tow, surprises Minkowski more than it should have. She wasn’t paying attention.  
   
“Can you help me get Hera into the car?” he asks, and she nods. Between the three of them, they get her high enough off the ground to set her into the seat and buckle it. Once they’ve set her down, Hera yawns in her simulated sleep. She turns, slightly, but doesn’t open her eyes.  
   
“Dream of electric sheep, baby,” he murmurs, and leans over to press his lips to her forehead. “You promised me you’d be fine, kay?"

* * *

Lovelace drives.  
   
Hera is in the passenger seat, leaning on the front window and drowsing throughout the trip. Eiffel sits directly behind her, which leaves Minkowski behind Lovelace, doggedly trying not to catch Lovelace’s eye in the rearview mirror.  
   
The weather shifts along with the landscape, and it seems the higher they go the brighter the sunlight gets. They have apparently been lucky enough to land on the one weekend the mountain passes were entirely clear of rain or snow.  
   
It’s quiet in the car for hours. Eiffel doesn’t try to turn his music back on, and no one says a word. Minkowski probably sleeps at some point.  
   
Lovelace doesn’t.  
   
When Minkowski is conscious enough to take note of their surroundings again, they’ve changed completely. The landscape is red rock and orange sand as far as she can see, scrubby trees and bushes completing the desert scenery. Arizona.  
   
The Grand Canyon.  
   
Minkowski should probably be happy Lovelace even remembered where they were going.  
   
She just wants to talk to Lovelace again. Offer to drive, ask if she wants a snack, anything. She can’t make herself start the sentences. Lovelace pulls over at a truck stop, nothing more than a grimy bathroom and a single bench.  
   
“Someone else drive,” she says, and gets out.  
   
It’s more than a little awkward having to follow her into the bathroom, but Minkowski has also been sitting in a car for hours and bodily urges wait for no inconvenient emotions.  
   
Everyone reconvenes in the car a few minutes later, and Eiffel settles into the driver’s seat. It’s the first time he’s driven so far, despite it technically being his car. He glances in the back - Minkowski and Lovelace, still refusing to talk to each other - and turns on his music.  
   
It’s not what Minkowski was expecting - there’s none of the classic rock or pop songs that had pervaded the first half of the trip.  
   
The four people listen in silence.  
   
Hera wakes up somewhere between a small town called Winslow and an even smaller town known only as Two Guns.  
   
It’s apparently a ghost town, and it takes the combined efforts of all three women to convince Eiffel not to pull over and check it out. That conversation is the first time Lovelace has spoken more than three words since that morning.  
   
They arrive at Grand Canyon in the late afternoon, and Eiffel pulls over before Minkowski says a word. There isn’t even a lookout point, just a flat red landscape that drops away without warning.  
   
She gets out, stumbling over loose rock and shale. There’s a small guard rail, and she leans over it without a care for the massive drop just beneath her.  
   
The Grand Canyon stretches out in front of her, vast and unshakable. The Hephaestus itself could probably fit inside of it and the image of even Wolf 359 in Minkowski’s mind is dwarfed by the immensity of this place. Lines of crimson and amber strafe the sides of the canyon, themselves dwarfed by pillars of rock that rise up from the ground far below. Scrubby trees eke out a life for themselves along the walls, fighting to survive every day.  
   
Minkowski can relate to that.  
   
She jumps a little when Eiffel walks up next to her, not paying attention to anything beyond the deep tear in the earth that seems to go on for miles. Hera is hanging onto one of his arms, sleepily blinking at the grand vistas around her.  
   
“Did you know you can see the Grand Canyon from space?” he asks.  
   
Minkowski nods. “We took off at the wrong time,” she says. “It wasn’t visible when we were close enough to see it.” She doesn’t say that at the time she wouldn’t have even cared, too in love with the stars to even think about what she was leaving behind on this tiny planet with its massive canyons.  
   
“I’ve seen pictures o-online,” Hera murmurs. “But it’s not - it’s not the same.”  
   
The three of them are quiet. Minkowski feels like if she stepped off the edge of the cliff face in front of her, she would never hit the ground. Just soar through the canyon, gliding past rock formations and catching updrafts from the river below.  
   
She catches herself just before she turns to Lovelace and ask if she thinks it’s legal to try and climb sections of the wall. Lovelace isn’t here, hasn’t even left the car.  
   
Minkowski leaves Eiffel and Hera at the barrier and walks over to the car. Lovelace is curled up on the backseat, and it looks like she’s asleep. Minkowski opens the door quietly.  
   
“Lovelace,” she whispers. _Isabel,_ she doesn’t. “We made it to the canyon.”  
   
The former captain of the Hephaestus wakes up far slower than she used to. Minkowski remembers, on the Hephaestus… Lovelace slept rarely and fitfully, springing awake the moment she was no longer dead on her feet. Now she drowses and turns her face further into the leather seat when Minkowski puts a hand on her arm to try and wake her.  
   
“Five more minutes, Renée,” she mumbles.  
   
Minkowski lets her sleep. She jogs back over to Eiffel and Hera. “Let’s go to one of the actual lookout points,” she says, and shepherds them towards the car.  
   
They end up stopping at a crowded stone building with an observation area just beyond it. There were more people here than they’d seen for most of their trip, crowding each other onto stone crags and up against the fences.  
   
Lovelace is awake now, staring out the window in mute awe.  
   
When they park the car, Eiffel and Hera head into the building that advertises itself as the Lookout Studio Gift Shop.  
   
Minkowski and Lovelace walk together to the edge of the viewpoint. They don’t talk, they don’t touch. But they’re there together.  
   
Wind tugs at their hair, their clothes. The sweatshirt Minkowski is wearing doesn’t do enough to keep out the chill, and she shivers a little.  
   
Lovelace takes her hand.  
   
The first drops of rain begin to fall.  
   
It begins to really pour as they run back to the gift shop, and they don’t make it inside before getting absolutely soaked. The building is packed now, wet people coming in from the rain and those who had been in there just to pick up a quick gift now trapped by the new influx of people. They find Eiffel and Hera tucked into a corner behind a rack of stuffed animals, each wearing a Grand Canyon t-shirt and Hera holding a gift bag to her chest.  
   
“We got you two shirts as well,” she says, and hands it to Minkowski. “You can put them on in the bathroom.” It’s hard to say no to Hera, especially when she smiles and it makes Minkowski remember for how long Hera had no way to smile at them.  
   
The shirts are soft, still creased from where they’ve sat folded on a display. Also dry, which is nice considering that the clothes both women had been wearing were not about to be dry any time in the next hour.  
   
Eiffel and Hera are beaming at them when they exit the bathroom, and Eiffel holds up his phone. “We’ve been on this roadtrip for like, forever, and we haven’t taken a single selfie. That is a crime against humanity.”  
   
The four of them brave the storm to reach the edge of the viewpoint. There are only one or two other people out here now, and for good reason. Thunder rumbles in the distance, and rain still pours from the heavens. All of them are soaking wet in seconds.  
   
They line up, Eiffel in front as the designated camera holder. He takes several selfies in the next thirty seconds, all of them probably blurry and out of focus and not at all representative of the grandeur of the canyon itself.  
   
Minkowski is going to frame all of them and hang them in their home forever.

* * *

After the selfies have been taken and Minkowski has dashed into the gift shop one last time to buy a poster that caught her eye and Lovelace grabs more candy than is reasonable, they all pile back into the car in a damp happy mess.  
   
They still haven’t talked about that morning. But for now, Lovelace offers Minkowski a KitKat and things don’t look quite so bad.  
   
The rain keeps pouring, down and down and down into the evening.  
   
They’re somewhere in Monument Valley when they have to stop. There’s a blockade on the road, warning for flash floods further into the valley and nothing on the road behind them for miles.  
   
Minkowski pulls over, puts the car in park.  
   
“Want to go hiking?” she asks, not really expecting Lovelace to nod and jump out of the car without missing a beat.  
   
Minkowski leaves her coat in the car and follows Lovelace out into the rain. There’s almost nothing but flat crimson plains slowly turning into sienna mud for miles. In the distance, Minkowski can just make out hulking shapes that are probably the monuments of Monument Valley.  
   
Lovelace is surging ahead, jogging up a low hill. Electricity crackles in the air around them; the hair on Minkowski’s arm stands on edge. “Lovelace!” she shouts. No response. “Isabel!” Lovelace stops, looks back.  
   
“You coming, Minkowski?”  
   
Minkowski looks behind her. The car is a red-brown smudge on the gray road, already disappeared behind curtains of rain. She looks ahead. Lovelace stands in front of her on a stone ledge, beads of water running down her face and dripping from her hair. She’s grinning, teeth white in the darkness of the evening storm. She’s beautiful.  
   
“I’ll beat you to the top!” she yells, suddenly unafraid to be loud. Minkowski runs up the hillside, the burn in her lungs and the chill in the air reminding her every second of how lucky she is to be alive, to be here and real and jumping from rock to rock with Lovelace just behind her.  
   
She beats Lovelace to the top, but only barely. They lie on the ground, panting and letting the rain cool them off. Thunder is sounding again in the distance, but Minkowski hasn’t seen any lightning yet. She rolls over, probably covering her new shirt in red clay and mud.  
   
“Isabel,” she says.  
   
Lovelace props herself up, looks Minkowski in the eye. “Renée.”  
   
“I’m sorry I yelled at you this morning.”  
   
Lovelace shakes her head, the motion sending tiny water droplets scattering through the air. “You were right.”  
   
“No, see, that doesn’t give me the right to say it the way I did.” Minkowski sighs. “I’m no good at this. Never was. We all say things without thinking, no one can ever be nice all the time. I was just- I was just worried. The car wasn’t working, we were in the middle of nowhere, and…” She has to say it. “I was so afraid. Then and now.” That’s not it. “I still don’t know if Dominik is alive somewhere.” She has to tell Lovelace the truth, why she was so afraid. “I still miss him.” Lovelace’s eyes are so, so dark and Minkowski is still terrified of how she feels. “But… I think…” She can’t say it. Lightning strikes at last, illuminating the landscape in an electric grayscale.  
   
Lovelace sits up, knees pressed against Minkowski’s side. Her hand is cool on Minkowski’s face, streaking clay on her cheek. “Renée,” she whispers. “I know.”  
   
She pulls Minkowski up, up into a kiss. Lovelace tastes like earth and metal, and the thunder makes the ground shudder under her feet.  
   
“I love you,” she gets out, hiding her words in Lovelace’s lips and the thunder still rumbling through the air.  
   
“I know, I know,” Lovelace is saying, over and over. “I love you too, I have for longer than I should and I don’t know how to stop.”  
   
“Don’t,” Minkowski tells her, and kisses her again. “Don’t ever, ever stop.”  
   
Lightning strikes again, and the light turns Lovelace into an angel in shades of silver. Minkowski thinks that this, this is what home feels like, not a house or a building or a single location on a map. It’s here, it’s at a haunted motel in Kansas, it’s driving through endless forests and cornfields and shitty rest stops. It’s Eiffel telling her pop culture facts to keep her awake in lazy afternoons of driving, it’s Hera smiling, Hera holding Eiffel’s hand, Hera doing everything she could never do before. It’s Lovelace, kissing Minkowski in an Arizona rainstorm.  
   
It’s always, always here.

**Author's Note:**

> here it is! my 12k frickin massive road trip minlace fic. I adore this fic with my whole heart and I hope you do too!!! I will update this with links to the art when it's posted.


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